


Paying the Piper

by deathwailart



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, F/F, Fairy Tale Retellings, Femslash, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 11:23:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7047667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Out in the wastes, Robin, Ruby and Luna encounter a wretch who tells them a simple thing: it is one hundred years since our children left.  </p><p>Only it isn't really so simple when they head out to Hamelin, where Robin hears the music and learns what it means to pay the piper.</p><p>Written for the femslash big bang May prompt: fairy tales</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paying the Piper

With a soft grunt Robin makes the final adjustment to Luna's leg brace, tightening the bolt that came loose on their way down to the settlement, both of them crouched in the shade currently affording them and Ruby a decent vantage point. The truth of the matter is that Hamelin hasn't been a settlement in a good century, near as anyone can tell. Ruby's family have some patchy records, and Marian somehow just happened to just have a few lying around but like so many things, it all gets fuzzy after a certain point. Things do that. Maybe it's what happens when one world ends and no one is quite sure if the next one has started, or is started, or if the world really ended at all in the first place. Everyone and everything has an opinion on that matter but drawing them into it isn't something that should be done in the first place. Besides, everyone has a story close enough to Hamelin to tell around a fire, on a caravan trail, after a long day in a succession of long days fighting the soil to produce enough to scrape by to raise another generation, over a lukewarm drink in a bar where everyone's eyes slide past one another so they can't linger for too long. Even Marian warned Robin away from this place, and things are better, not good, maybe about as good as they're ever going to get so when she'd leant across the bar, looking so serious before they'd set out, it had meant something.  
  
"Robbie," and she hadn't called Robin that since things were really good. Back when they'd had a crew, an operation, before Marian wanted to settle because she had everything she wanted. Robin had tried. Failed. Had left angry with Luna on another job only to come back with a ringing in her left ear that wouldn't stop. "Nothing good comes out of that place. Everyone who's got a story about someone who went Hamelin way is someone who has a story with an ending they can barely tell you. You go digging into _before_ days things…"  
  
They'd both looked at Luna. At Ruby. Robin had shouldered her gear the same time her mouth had gone hard when she set her jaw, walking over to kiss both her girls, like it was just another job. Marian had gone through hell to defend settlers but she'd grown up in that life, and she hadn't seen what they'd seen. Not what had left Luna with an animal lurking beneath her skin that had stalked Ruby's caravan for months after she'd escaped the facility without them knowing, when they'd been mourning, when Robin's grief had almost broken her and Ruby both. Robin's arrow that's the reason Luna has a brace on her right leg. Luna's claw that claimed the sight in Ruby's left eye.  
  
No, Marian didn't understand that when someone had joined up with the caravan Ruby's grandmother (easier to skip off all those greats, less upsetting to see how the generations stacked up so quickly now, to see what now passed for old) who could only moan over and over 'it is one hundred years since our children left' for days and days until at last something settled in Robin the way a stone settles in a well, deep and dark and almost silent, slipping into the blackness. They couldn't just shrug it off. They couldn't just ignore it and walk away. They'd stayed with Luna those long and painful days.  
  
(But no one knows that. It had just been them, the screaming, the tears, the silence that had threatened to swallow them that somehow scares Robin more than anything else.)  
  
"Thanks," Luna murmurs, drawing Robin back into the present with her voice close to a growl at this time of the month. She stretches, bending her leg to test the joint. Beneath the metal frame and road leathers is the scar Robin put there, the scar she kisses and strokes in apology each and every morning and night when they get the chance. If it were a story like some of the ones they've read to one another from the books in old crumbling ruins then her kisses would be enough to erase it, that it would all be some spell and they'd emerge again untouched. But bodies and the world have longer memories than man, so her grief and regret are hers to carry, in a world where there are only terrible stories told by gaping wretches with trembling hands.  
  
Robin manages a smile right as Ruby whistles the way only caravan daughters can, high and sharp because Robin hears that better than anything else. She never used to know tricks like that, and she still hasn't mastered it, can't get it right now because she can't hear it properly when she tries it herself, it sounds just a little off when she attempts to make the sound but she remembers the girl that started tagging along with Marian at first, when they were children pretending they were grown. (But they were always grown, being a child is so fleeting because you if you survive then you're grown, if you don't then well, you don't live to remember then do you?) It had been enough to make her realise how lucky she'd been. Maybe that's why it had been so devastating when it had finally run out. That it hadn't been content just to be confined to her. That it had reached out for Luna and Ruby too because they'd been drawn up so tight, stitched together at the seams, inseparable.  
  
"We should get moving, follow the shadows down," Ruby tells them when Robin and Luna join her, moving to make sure she's on Robin's good side so she can hear her without having to raise her voice, half to be safe, and half because Robin either doesn't hear or she hears too much, ringing and white noise that drive her all the way up the wall and back down it. "If you're good to go?" She hesitates, squinting to look at Luna from behind her goggles, the lenses smeared with dust and fingerprints from a battle she surrendered to on the way up the ridge. Even in the shadows the glare will still be too much for her to take them off.  
  
"Robin fixed it, loose screw, felt it give somewhere on the climb when I lost my footing." Luna squeezes Robin's hand, strokes stray sweaty hair coloured red and orange from dust and sand back under Ruby's bandana before kissing her brow. "Didn't smell anything but and the wildlife on the way, and nothing smelt like something we should worry too much about. But we're burning daylight and we don't know what's down there." She sets off first, shouldering her pack with one hand, the other extended behind her for Ruby since she can't quite tell distance and depth so well in the lengthening shadows.  
  
"It's abandoned," Robin confirms. "Or reliably abandoned. No settlers have come of it since our contact and raiders don't go near it, not even drifters. Wildlife you can't smell, buildings collapsing, whatever shit they left behind from before." Predictable problems really on the surface but this sort of abandoned combined with what happened to Luna means that the three of them carry a certain sort of knowledge of even the limited rules of the world as it is now going out the window.  
  
Robin keeps her bow ready, like she always does. The two women she loves have been hurt enough by her that she's not about to let it happen again on her watch so she's always prepared, always ready; she can't quite believe she's still allowed near them let alone still trusted, still loved. Forgiveness comes more easily to some than others. Marian, for instance, is never going to forgive her for leaving in the first place. She's always going to hold her anger in her jaw, somewhere behind her teeth. And there's no way to say to a person _it wasn't that you weren't enough, it's that the world is too much_ without it still sounding like that first part no matter how carefully you phrase it, and Robin has never been good with words. Ahead of her, Luna and Ruby are talking, but between watching her feet and theirs, watching for any danger because she can't help it now since she exists in a state where she's just _waiting_ for something to come, for the peace to be broken again and for a hand to reach out and tap her on the shoulder or for a shot to ring out, or a trap to snap, or for the low wicked laughter of raiders or any of the other hellscapes her mind churns out for her most nights, their words become a buzzing droning roar she almost tries to swat away. Eventually though she ends up wincing because of course even that is replaced by shrill whistling whine matching the explosion that went off next to her. She got off lucky. She knows that. There aren't even many scars unless you go poking around under her hair but when she fruitlessly works her jaw like she did when they could all keep up the charade that her hearing on that side might come back, that it was maybe just like getting it to pop, it's hard to remember to be grateful for her lot.  
  
Ruby tugs her hand to pull her back to the here and now when she lags behind too far, pointing up at the sign that has no right to be so maintained amidst the crumbling and dilapidated ruins of Hamelin. The wind around the picks up, blowing dust again the way it does everywhere but down here they have to fumble quickly with scarves, Luna whining until they kiss her quickly in apology. Robin's heart clenches when they have to cover her mouth. She's told them in halting moments between one skin and the other what they did to her. Luna doesn't know though that Ruby uses her own coin from the caravan cut to track down any scrap of rumour she can. She doesn't know that Robin still runs jobs on facilities just to find out more even when they're husks left to bleach and decay beneath radioactive skies, already picked clean, when Robin already promised she wouldn't go back, not again, not after what happened, when Robin almost died too.  
  
They take a moment to adjust themselves, to blink and marvel at the fact that the wretch came from this place all the way to Marian's. That's when Robin looks down and curses into her scarf.  
  
"Footprints," she says, when the dust that's red and fine and blinding has already covered them, a dust with teeth and claws that seems to tear at them for their trespass. If Marian believed in such things (she doesn't, Robin is the one that believes in strange things, Marian is practical, logical, a settler, a scientist, a woman rebuilding the world) then this is the thing Robin would think she'd been warning them about.  
  
Luna bends low to the ground, mindful of her brace but she sees better than Robin does. "Small footprints," she confirms, muffled behind her scarf, measuring their size with her fingers.  
  
"It is one hundred years since our children left," Ruby intones, solemn as the church bells that only ring if they're kept to sound alarms, or when the ropes rot or get sawn through because they're too precious to waste lying up there until the shepherds can come calling their flocks back.  
  
Robin's glad they're all hidden behind scarves to keep the dust from damaging their throats and mouths worse than it already has. It was all the wretch (everyone thinks Robin is good, and kind, and charitable, that Robin harkens back to days blasted into bits by the way, and that somehow she doesn't think rude or uncharitable thoughts, particularly about people, as if she isn't just as much of a person as anyone else, and capable of judgement and poor choices as they all are) could say to them. It makes her shiver in her leathers, causing them to shift where they've stuck uncomfortably to her skin with sweat.  
  
"Don't go repeating that," Luna mutters, straightening up and staggering. Ruby moves immediately to steady her. "Gave me the creeps. I mean Marian is probably right about some of it somewhere down the road: they're crazy and we're walking into some sort of trap, they're crazy and we're walking into crazy, they're somehow telling the truth and we're walking into one of the two? Or a combination of all of them. I mean who hits one hundred these days?" She waits for their rebuttals, but Robin knows she doesn't have one herself, simply waiting until Luna continues. "Not even folks in bunkers that sending out those damn sanctimonious and pathetic radio broadcasts make it that long but…but they _definitely_ said since _our_ children left."  
  
A heavy silence settles over the three of them, only interrupted by the ever-present wind this far out that goes rattling through the skeletal remains of the buildings, blowing away their footprints but somehow leaving so many little ones intact. Sweat prickles on Robin's brow, she adjusts her grip on her bow. At the bottom of her pack a mass of money shifts. Old money. Faded, worn, useless to her, Ruby or Luna, but that owner of that ruined mouth had pressed it into her hands with their shaking ruined hands with surprising strength, repeating those words over and over until she had asked why.  
  
Ruby and Lunda don't know this part, and she hopes they can forgive her either way, that they won't come to harm, and that if there's hurt then it can be taken out entirely on her flesh this time. The wretch, so wrinkled, so shrunken, ravaged by time and the wastes had clutched Robin's hands until it had hurt and blood had welled up between them, leaning across the table to whisper in Robin's right ear. Their breath had smelt of the facility, despair buried beneath a sterility the world had forgotten it feared, Ruby's blood and tears and that particular scent of earth turned to mud by them, the sun in Marian's hair that last morning when she hadn't been enough to make Robin stay.  
  
"Time to pay the piper." They'd said only that, simple words, nonsense words, but words that had settled somewhere in Robin like her lock picks do in ancient doors rusted into disuse, something opening in her.  
  
The thing is, no one really knows outside of the people that _know_ that Robin has a bad ear. It could've been coincidence but it didn't feel like that then and it doesn't feel like that now. Robin shifts her bow, passes it from hand to hand to wipe her palms on her stained road leathers, as if the memory of that touched could so easily be erased.  
  
"We should look around," she says at last because they've been standing out here for far too long, three dark shapes casting three lengthening shadows anyone or anything could see or mark. Empty ruins stand sentinel to glower down at them as they go, strangely not picked clean as so many other places entirely in the middle of nowhere are. They've been disturbed, touched by time, ravaged the way near everywhere else has until they come to a room where a child was, where even the dust won't blow in. Little shrines, like the ones people keep to before days things, barely even bleached by the weather.  
  
Luna makes a noise in her throat, Ruby shakes her head, and eventually they finally agree to start fresh in the morning. Robin can't look either of them in the eye when they finally make camp in the most serviceable building available to them where Luna props her leg up on her bedroll, the brace off and her trousers gone to reveal skin still so shockingly pale and pink from whatever those monsters did to her; it grows back new each time she bursts out of it, she told them that and they've seen it, felt it, something they don't understand but Luna works so hard for her acceptance. People would kill her for a whole lot less, or sell her, or do so much worse because they know there's worse than death. Robin kisses her leg, massages the aches from the muscles, and thinks about all the possibilities she collects in the small hours on watch, when Ruby and Luna are asleep, when she imagines everything that might ever happen to them if she isn't ready for it. It's the same with Ruby's blind spot. Not quite so many possibilities branching outward but it only takes one shot, one person moving carefully where she can't see them and she's gone. Robin's fault. Neither of them blame her as much as she might want them to. They've got better hearts than that somehow.  
  
All of them jump when her pack falls over, the weight of the money in it overbalancing it but Luna's got her brace, and Ruby can't judge distance, and Robin is used to shouldering plenty so she took it and wouldn't let them argue with her about it.  
  
Up through what might have been swings or streetlights but are now just twisted columns of metal slag, Robin swears she hears the drifting remnants of a song buzzing at the edges of her hearing. Her head snaps up sharp enough that it makes her neck hurt but Luna merely gives her a look that she waves away, turning to stare out one of the windows as she sits up carefully. If Luna can't hear it – and she'd have said something, or she'd be sitting with her head cocked to figure out where it's come from – then she'd have said something, because Luna can hear for miles and miles, especially when the air is as still and quiet as it is. More likely Robin is hearing things, it happens, the doctor said it was a possibility. Usually though it's buzzing, droning, humming. Not songs that sound familiar yet aren't.  
  
She'd know it if she knew the song.  
  
Maybe the job is getting to her at last, everyone says it happens, that eventually the fear and paranoia that keep you alive get too much and tip you over the edge.  
  
"We should get some sleep," she announces. After all, Luna hears and smells well enough that she always picks up danger, and Ruby has the instincts of a girl growing up on the caravan runs where attacks came from all sides at a moment's notice. And Robin? She's a thief that almost got the women she loves killed; guilt gnaws great gaping holes in her day and night, keeping her too wary to really relax. But they've scouted, they've eaten, they're safe enough that they can all curl up and sleep together tonight.  
  
"We'll figure it out in the morning with fresh eyes?" Ruby suggests, and to most it'd just be that, a suggestion, but she screws up her face the way Robin knows she does when she's frustrated, like she's sucking on something sour. Next to her Luna laughs. Robin can't though because she gets stuck on the plural when it comes out of Ruby's mouth and the laughter dies, Ruby finally pulling off her goggles with a grimace and a sigh, the clouded scarred eye more accusing than the brown. "Christ Robin, I'm allowed to make jokes. None of us fucking died."  
  
Ruby's mouth is a thin hard line, lips pressed so tightly together that they're white, and Luna begins to curl in on herself. Robin doesn't have the words to take back what she said without words in the first place, feeling the gap between them getting wider again. The warning bells are faint but that could be because the hearing is muffled in her left ear anyway but they sound like the facility, her breath, her heart, realising too late that Luna wasn't there with her until she had to go crawling back with nothing to show for it but her tears and the line of blood running down from her ear. Luna puts out the fire from dinner, finally rolling out her blanket as she tests her leg again, a dull quiet pop echoed by the one in her jaw as she yawns, huge enough to seemingly swallow the world if she wanted to.  
  
"Sooner we figure this out, sooner we get paid," she murmurs sleepily with complaint. "We need to do it like the caravans one of these days. Deposits up front."  
  
"Careful. You'll make us sound like a business." Ruby says, blankets rustling as they all wriggle and shift closer to one another, beneath what remains of the roof beneath a sickly orange-green sky, bright enough here that it means the stars are out. "Like we're reputable."  
  
Robin looks at her slumped over pack, like it's mocking her then back to Ruby, still able to recognise a friendly jab. "I'm reputable."  
  
"Plenty of others beg to differ."  
  
"I do good deeds. I give to the needy by taking from those who need the least or not at all, and I don't take more than _I_ need for myself, and I try not to hurt anyone too badly in the process." She's proud of how little her voice hitches, but that's probably down to the exhaustion more than anything on her part. "That makes me reputable."  
  
"Makes you a thief," Luna replies gently, eyes glinting in what passes for dark that gives away that she's not entirely human anymore, not really. "If you didn't have us or Marian around who knows what you'd be."  
  
Robin falls silent, yawns hugely at the right moment, stretching until all her joints crack; she snags her bow closer and allows for the quiet kisses and distribution of limbs. Nothing more exciting tonight in a place like this. Nothing more when she barely deserves what she has, when it's been brought up so devastatingly easily. Instead she drifts into an uneasy sleep where fragments of the song chasing her whether her eyes are open or not. Her dreams reliably play out the way they always do; returning achingly alone, Marian's accusations, something stalking them before it bursts out, Ruby's blood in radioactive dirt, her arrow in a monster's knee when the monster is no longer something like an overgrown wolf but Luna, all underscored by the ringing in her ear getting steadily worse not better.  
  
Come morning after a breakfast of leftovers, the song still on the edges of her hearing, Robin finally cracks enough to mention it, to see if they have even a hint of it. "Neither of you left your radios on, not even a little?" She asks, aiming for casual but missing by about a mile judging by their looks. They humour her, checking their radios and hers, and of course all three are off, set to pick up emergency transmissions only. Nothing has come out of Hamelin that isn't a rumour in a century.  
  
"We can check out anything that might be broadcasting still first, just to be safe." Ruby decides as she shoulders her pack, leading the way out and into the sun, Luna tugging her goggles into place for her. "Is your ear bothering you?"  
  
"And be honest," Luna adds. It's a caveat she's responsible for when she kept her pain to herself then nearly died from an infection. Robin and Ruby spent such a long and terrified vigil by her bedside, trading shifts as the days and nights blurred, burning through favours to get what she needed to fight it off, the life fading from them as she screamed, shook, sweated, or either lapsed into prone silent misery, staring at the ceiling and beyond.  
  
With a sigh Robin shrugs because she doesn't know and she hates that. "I hear…something? I don't know how to explain it; sometimes I hear things that aren't there to make up for what I don't hear in the first place." She taps the ear. No matter how long it's been, it still unsettles her to feel her fingers but not to hear them muffling the sound over it. "It happens, you both know that, it was just that I heard a song this time…" Her voice trails off into nothingness between their scrutiny, watching the skittering progress of a freckled lizard with two tails chasing after a fat green beetle, pausing for a moment to survey the three loud giant invaders before deciding the beetle is a better prospect.  
  
She feels almost envious, to have such easy decisions to make. Her pack is so heavy already that her back burns under the weight.  
  
"We can start with that definitely but," Luna cocks her head this way and that, Ruby biting her lip to stifle a laugh, "I definitely don't hear anything."  
  
"Like I said-" Robin shrugs, looking to Ruby for support she's not sure she'll find these days when she spies something very like Marian in her, when she's still maybe annoyed from last night.  
  
"I wonder if we could figure out something for your ear like my goggles. That eye gets just enough light that it wants to try to fill in what it can, sometimes it's just colours everywhere if I go without them." She sets off for one of the buildings they gave a cursory search upon arrival, the gears turning in her head as she goes. "Might be worth it if you're willing."  
  
Robin hums, neither agreeing nor disagreeing as they begin the search, looking for radios or anything that might be creating the song she's hearing if it really exists (they find none, she wishes she could be surprised by that and not resigned), as she pokes through stacks of books, through wardrobes of old clothes, through odds and ends that they sometimes laugh over. How could the world ever be so ridiculous, so frivolous? Easy roles to fall into but it isn't salvaging useful parts or objects like it would usually be, or recovering lost goods, or stealing things that people need, it's hunting down the clues for this wretch, to pay this piper that lead only to Hamelin, that came from a face that joined the caravan and kept pace to the Merry Men. They work until morning gives way to noon, sharing lunch and even trading kisses because Robin is desperate to make amends, better with gestures not words; Luna splits their lips open but smiles her apologies, a reminder of a moon they can't see this far out. It all begs the question how so much has survived. The footprints theirs never disturb. Luna suggests splitting up after lunch to cover more ground so on go their radios, Robin ignoring the song that tugs at her the way the wayward breeze does her hair, a child's laughter, the creak of swings needing oiled, a great heavy bell tolling, all of it enough to have her clenching her jaw until her teeth ache.  
  
She searches, she finds nothing. Ruby does. Luna does. Alone, Ruby finds a book in the shattered ruins of the church, collapsing in on itself as if weeping for all the souls it has ever lost. Her voice crackles, hisses, pops, underscored by the static and interference but Robin stops thumbing through children's drawings and schoolbooks to listen.  
  
"The first record I can read is dated roughly a hundred years ago, a lot of…it's faded or damaged, the pages are so thin I'm scared to touch them but I can make out some. This was either back before the war, or at the start, or just after, I don't think it makes much difference now. But they had a- had a problem with-" Ruby cuts herself off with a scoffing noise, surprise or disbelief, it's hard to tell over the bad connection. "It says rats but I don't think it means rats like we mean rats, something about the tone…I don't know, Look, long story short: they had a rat problem, someone showed up saying they could deal with it, and the people here said they'd pay them. Rats got dealt with. _But_ ," Ruby drags the word out, and Robin leans closer to her radio like an idiot, drinking it in because Ruby has this effect on her, always has, "they didn't pay. In fact they even say that their mystery saviour caused the whole problem in the first place. Or that they believed they did."  
  
Luna scoffs this time but Robin's heart skips a beat before it sinks, the words a slap. Hasn't she heard something like that more than once over the years? When raiders or militia or those-who-have decided to take back what she'd taken from them from the people she gave it to? The problem she'd caused and left behind her thinking she'd done something good? The weight in her pack makes it hard to walk because she has to get out, has to breathe fresh air, has to get out of this building closing her in, adjusting the straps to try to stop them from cutting them into her shoulders.  
  
"Anyway," Ruby continues after she must realise her audience has had long enough to digest what she's said. "The mystery saviour-"  
  
"Piper," Robin interrupts without thinking, listening distantly to the little hitch in Ruby's voice when she says it.  
  
"How did…where did you hear that Robin?"  
  
"Keep going, I might've found something, I want to be sure." It's not a lie when she's this certain about _something_ but it hurts the same as a lie does.  
  
"Well the piper shows up and all the children disappear, all one hundred and thirty of them, the date on the record checks out, then it's just what the wretch at the bar said over and over and over again, it's actually pretty creepy."  
  
"All the footprints lead out together." It's Luna that speaks this time. "Only small footprints and I have no idea how the footprints have lasted so again, creepy like everything else in this place, it's just dust and dirt, and ours definitely disappear right after. But I followed to where they're thickets. All of them seem to head out to a cave out in the range opposite the way we came in – don't worry, I'm not out there." Despite herself and where her feet are already leading her, Robin smiles because when it's creeping closer to that time of the month, Luna takes very great pains to point out when she's not being reckless. "I followed them back instead, I'm still checking but they all converge from houses, shops, maybe what was a park, wherever children were."  
  
"Are we really considering this? That someone lead the children out? I mean what comes first? The how or the why of it?" Ruby's voice sounds so far away now, the song not just in Robin's head but on the radio as she finds herself fiddling with the dial, tuning out their argument as if they've forgotten about her.  
  
Good. It's better that way, she thinks, her footsteps following the little ones to the yawning mouth of the cave, her pack so damn heavy that she's glad to sit down one she's inside, sheltered from the sun and the dust, Hamelin little more than a speck in the distance, and even that's lost in the heat haze and the dust whipped up by the wind. How far did she walk? Is it just sweat that has her feet slick and pulsing in her boots? Slowly her eyes adjust to the gloom and it's then that she realises she's not alone.  
  
There are lights in the dark. Pale and flickering with a wet sheen to them, too many for her to count, all of them trained upon her but when she tries to get to her feet she can't. Ruby and Luna's voices are long gone. The song is gone too. She's rooted to the spot, anchored, a shrill whine screaming in her ear until she curses, gritting her teeth. Then there's silence, real silence, the kind she'd forgotten even existed as a figure steps from the shadows, hands outstretched.  
  
"Time to pay the piper," they whisper, the words echoing strangely, not off the walls and she looks again, looks harder and the lights are little eyes, the echo coming from little mouths. She knows there will be one hundred and thirty mouths, and that the flickering is really the blinking of one hundred and thirty pairs of eyes, and that without realising it she listened to a song and followed the trail of a hundred and thirty pairs of feet here to this spot. Her heart stops, or tries to, her blood wishing it could run cold, her body wishing it could shiver.  
  
She knows who or what she's speaking to without having to ask, finding her voice after she works her throat. "My pack, I have it. What was promised to you before."  
  
"Not that," they chorus, the piper shuffling closer with a strange limping gait, as if one leg pains them or as if they can't see so well in the gloom. "Pay the piper."  
  
"I said that I have it," she repeats, clearer this time, confused. Tired. Far more tired than she is afraid.  
  
"Too late for that, time moved on and they have to suffer. The world has a longer memory than man, man repeats so quickly, the world more slowly, she has less choice, she's fixed. Man has a choice." The piper stops, bending at the waist to loom over Robin, stinking of damp dog, fresh blood, scorched earth, chemicals with names she's afraid of. Their left eye is the colour of milk, clouded over. Their right leg trembles to hold their weight. One hundred and thirty eyes watch as a drop of blood runs from their left ear to land on Robin's cheek beneath her left eye, red as the tears Ruby wept as she healed from Luna's claws. "To pay the piper or not."  
  
"Someone came, they joined the caravan," Robin explains because it feels right to explain, wanting to wipe the blood away but she can't make her arm move, can barely hold her head up now.  
  
"They always do. They wander, they can't stop themselves. They think that the further they get from here the easier the forgetting will be, but the world is not like that." An awful smile splits the face, too many sharp teeth when Luna is the thing that's almost a wolf and Robin wonders if her throat will be torn out; why is she still sitting here like they're just two people talking in a bar?  
  
"Is it really a hundred years?" She asks finally. The nod is very slight. Not a single pair of one hundred and thirty pairs of eyes blinks. " _How_?"  
  
"The war changed a lot of things. It made it easier to give the word a push, a pull, a nudge, to say 'look over there' and there was a lot to look at, wouldn't you say?" Robin drops her head forward into her hands when it starts to throb, moaning low in her throat. The piper makes a sympathetic noise, a hand settling on her shoulder to squeeze. "They cheated me when people came for their children, the rats – you know, I can't really remember what it really was now? Soldiers, the war, raiders, something terrible they wanted rid of – well I got rid of them whatever it was and it wasn't easy. And I've kept their children safe for over a hundred years. I think that's more than anyone could say about children now. More than they ever did. Can you put a price on that?"  
  
"So why did the wretch come for me? Why do I hear the music?"  
  
"Because you have to pay me. A piper has to be paid, an indulgence demands a price and you have indulged in a thing that eats a hole in you. They sniff it out. They find that hole and they press something into it that widens it and swallows it, that drags it and you _down_." An angry chittering fills the cave. Somehow Robin manages to reach for her bow, thinking of Luna when she sees that trembling leg, of Ruby when she stares into that sightless eye. The approving smile surprises her. "If you don't pay then you sit here. I put out the lights in your eyes and you wander, you wander, you wander, until you have more lines on your face than a map, until Hamelin or somewhere else fills up that space. Of course so do they. A piper must be paid."  
  
"That's not fair!" Her voice is loud, and she tries to get to her feet, forces her legs to obey her until they're eye to eye, her and the piper, using her bow for leverage.  
  
"Life's not fair." An expansive shrug follows, as if to encompass the world. "Life happens. Like what happened to you, to them, it happens, you lived. You all have choices and you live with them. And you have a choice as you've been told: to pay the piper or not."  
  
"Haven't I already been doing that?" She asks miserably, not liking the sick lurch of her stomach, because she knows. She _knows_ and she doesn't know if she can do it. It's so easy on the face of it and yet—  
  
"I am the teacher, you are a student. I suggest you swallow your pride or would you rather let the world and your pride and that guilt and that hole swallow all the light up? You have them, they have you. Give it to me and consider it paid."  
  
One hundred and thirty pairs of lungs hold their breath as Robin looks up into a face that is three faces at once, Ruby and Luna and Robin; she dumps out the before days money, swinging the pack on, rubbing where it cut into her shoulders. In the space of a heartbeat she nods, flicking her radio back to the right frequency and then she's outside. Ruby and Luna are there and frantic, searching for her, shouting. Her pack is light and she runs to them, smiling, catching them with kisses like she hasn't in forever.  
  
"Let's get the hell out of here," she tells them when she can breathe again, when she's kissed them both soundly and held them tight. "I've paid the piper and it's a story for the road, and I want this shithole to my heels."  
  
Luna still limps, Ruby still needs her goggles, Robin still fluctuates between ringing and silence in one ear but she has a lightness in her steps and this is enough, what she has now, her and her girls. More than enough beneath this dirty wasteland sky.


End file.
